"There are various types of lies," according to Yuan Zhao, the narrator of Nell Freudenberger's first novel, "The Dissident." "An outright attempt to deceive another person is different from a story that feels true, and only needs to be translated into another form to be understood." This is as much a commentary on the writer's craft as on the pretenses all of us engage in at one time or another. When we narrate our histories, are we exposing ourselves or creating pleasing self-portraits that may only resemble the truth? "If you are a hider," Zhao says, "you have to be careful of seekers, who are drawn to you simply for the challenge of discovering something. But of course, hiders are drawn to seekers too; there is always some part of us that yearns to be found out."

"The Dissident" is a novel of ideas, a story whose plot crisscrosses the landscape of East meets West. Its very short chapters alternate, rather haphazardly, between the captivating Zhao and a cast of characters he encounters during an artist's residency in Los Angeles. The subjects of "politics and art and even death" are handled with great inventiveness and sophistication, yet many of the characters -- particularly those in the Southern California chapters -- are limited by disappointingly two-dimensional portrayals. Each time the vivid and acutely observed setting of an artists' community in Beijing yields to the Los Angeles suburbs, the novel seems to lose its inspiration.

East-West collisions, seen in this novel through the eyes of a Chinese visitor and his American hosts, are somewhat familiar territory for Freudenberger. In her well-received and impressive collection of short stories, "Lucky Girls," her main characters are usually expatriated Westerners whose lives are depicted with nuance and complexity. The cross-cultural unions and fissures in those five stories are both compelling and disastrous, illuminated by the precise and economic details that are essential to successful short fiction.

In her first novel, Freudenberger works on a much larger canvas with frustratingly mixed results. Her willingness to take on these multiple portraits, especially a group of avant-garde artists in late 20th century Beijing, is to be greatly admired, as is her sure handling of provocative questions about imitation and appropriation, performance art and its ownership. The novel is at its best when focusing on Zhao and his earlier involvement with the edgy experimentation of his Beijing peers, juxtaposed against his current fishbowl existence in the banal luxury of a Los Angeles suburb. His struggles to dissemble in order to fulfill expectations are fascinating as well as unsettling. He disappoints his American hosts by speaking fluent English and dressing in less than exotic clothing; he also disappoints by painting traditional landscapes and failing to inspire much worthwhile creativity in his jaded teenage students.

Ironically, the reader senses disappointment surging whenever the novelist turns her attention to the Americans and their superficial, typecast lives. Cece, the wealthy do-gooder still sorting out her feelings in the aftermath of an affair with her brother-in-law Phil, searches for her own identity as her adolescent children outgrow her, and her charitable causes fail to stimulate her. Her husband, Gordon, is more absence than presence, and he, too, easily disappears alongside his more vivid and more pathetic brother. Their sister Joan, a struggling novelist, is primarily a petty and competitive pretender.

In many ways, all of these characters, including the Dissident himself, are desperately simulating something they are not, either hoping to disappear behind a disguised self or feigning as if to make truth out of a conceit. A recurring theme in this novel, "something that is not art," asks for the kind of authenticity that can arise only from a fully conscious self-examination. There is one increasingly central character who seems to know who she genuinely is and has the courage to demonstrate it. The Chinese American student June is surrounded by classmates who are merely ambitious, mean, rebellious and ordinary. Only June, weaving and unweaving her mysterious fishing net, can both lure and reject -- and ultimately retain -- her teacher's fascination. And like Zhao's cousin (coyly referred to as X), June turns out to be a true original, taking risks at the boundaries of art, daring to make a statement that raises questions of its own.

Debate at the edge of the continuing cultural revolution, dissonance between East and West, the potential for integration and disintegration, transcendence and subversiveness, these are the investigations that resonate most effectively at the novel's end. "The Dissident" offers readers a profusion of reflections and insights that will linger long after the book has been read. Unfortunately, there is also a clutter of derivative images that prove distracting and less than engaging, "types" who remind us that original artistry is not an easy art to master.